Bee Movie buzzed off on Friday, March 1, and is no longer available on Netflix. The odd 2007 animated movie has seen a big resurgence in interest over the last few years – thanks in no small part to some viral online memes. Thankfully, you can still stream it on Peacock, as well as PVOD services where you can rent or purchase it.
Bee Movie is about a honey bee named Barry B. Benson (Jerry Seinfeld) who starts his job in his hive’s honey-production company, Honex Industries, and immediately finds himself dissatisfied with his small, inflexible role. While out collecting pollen, he gets lost and winds up on the balcony of a florist, who saves his life and becomes his friend. Barry and this human woman, Vanessa Bloome (Renée Zellweger), fall in love and seek to better the lives of bees everywhere. This DreamWorks movie was co-written by Seinfeld and three others, and it has become a cultural touchstone for all the wrong reasons.
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If all that sounds wacky to you, you’re not alone. Bee Movie is regarded by many as an oddity even in the world of early 2000s animated family comedies. As the story progresses, Barry falls in love with Vanessa, who reveals to him the horrors of the honey industry. Together, they sue the human race on behalf of all bees. The movie spends enough time in the courtroom to be categorized as a legal drama, and the story doesn’t even end there.
Bee Movie got a lukewarm reception at the box office and by critics when it was released, and it was generally filed away with other animated family movies of the time. Only years later was it unearthed as an internet meme, starting on Tumblr in 2011 and then on Facebook in 2015 when the script for the movie circulated online. At that point, commenters began to pick apart the movie’s plot, laughing at the fact that many people didn’t remember the specifics or had heard of the movie without ever seeing it.
Despite this viral resurgence, Bee Movie will remain a stand-alone cultural artifact. In 2018, fans asked Seinfeld if he would consider making a sequel to Bee Movie during a Q&A on Reddit. He responded: “I considered it this spring for a solid six hours. There’s a fantastic energy now for some reason, on the internet particularly. Tumblr, people brought my attention to. I actually did consider it, but then I realized it would make Bee Movie 1 less iconic. But my kids want me to do it, a lot of people want me to do it. A lot of people that don’t know what animation is want me to do it. If you have any idea what animation is, you’d never do it.”
You can stream the one and only Bee Movie now on Peacock, but it is no longer available on Netflix. You can also find it on a PVOD service or on DVD.
